Chapter 7 The Rainstorm
The rain began at three o'clock, a curtain of grey that fell across Hertfordshire with the suddenness of a stage effect.
Elizabeth and Jane had been at Netherfield since noon, ostensibly visiting to discuss wedding plans, actually because Jane wanted to see Bingley and Elizabeth had discovered that she wanted, with a new and startling urgency, to see Darcy.
This was Jane's doing. Not intentionally -- Jane did not scheme -- but her gentle persistence had worn Elizabeth's resistance to a polished nub.
"You are happy when you see him," Jane had said that morning, with the devastating simplicity of a woman who believed the world was generally good. "Why deny yourself happiness?"
Elizabeth had opened her mouth to list reasons and found, for the first time in her life, that she had none.
The rain made departure impossible. Bingley declared it a providential event and ordered rooms prepared with an enthusiasm that bordered on transparent, while Caroline observed the arrangements with the sour expression of a woman watching her home invaded by the enemy.
"It seems you are stranded again, Miss Eliza," Caroline said. "How unfortunate. One hopes this evening will be less eventful than your last overnight stay at a ball."
"One can hope," Elizabeth agreed pleasantly. "Though I find that eventful evenings tend to produce the most interesting results."
Caroline's smile could have curdled cream.
She retreated to her rooms with Mrs. Hurst, and the evening settled into a quiet domestic tableau: Bingley and Jane in the drawing room, talking softly over the fire, and Elizabeth wandering the corridors of Netherfield with a restlessness she could not name.
She found the library.
Of course she found the library. The room pulled at her like a magnet, or a memory, or both.
She pushed open the door and stepped inside, and the scent of leather and old paper hit her with the force of a physical recollection: his hands in her hair, his mouth on her throat, the sound he made when she pulled him closer.
The fire was burning this time, bright and steady, casting the room in amber.
Rain hammered against the windows, a percussive backdrop that made the room feel enclosed, intimate, a world unto itself.
She ran her fingers along the spines of the books and tried not to think about the last time she had been in this room and failed utterly.
She heard his step before she heard his voice. She was learning his particular footfall: measured, deliberate, the stride of a man who was always aware of where he stood.
"I thought I might find you here," Darcy said from the doorway.
"This seems to be our room."
"Does it?" He entered, closing the door behind him. Not all the way. A crack of light remained, a concession to propriety or its ghost. "I had not thought of it that way."
"Liar."
Something warm moved behind his eyes. He crossed to the fire and stood with his back to it, facing her, the flames casting his shadow long and dark across the carpet. Outside, thunder rolled, a deep vibration that Elizabeth felt in her bones.
"Are you well?" he asked. "The storm came quickly."
"I am not afraid of storms, Mr. Darcy."
"I did not suggest you were. I asked if you were well."
She leaned against the bookshelf and studied him.
He was in shirtsleeves, his coat abandoned somewhere, his cravat loosened, and the informality transformed him.
Without the armor of his perfectly tailored coat, he looked younger, more approachable, less like the master of Pemberley and more like a man standing in a room with a woman he wanted.
"I am well," she said. "Better than well. I have been thinking about your letter."
"You have mentioned the letter before. If its contents distress you --"
"They do not distress me. They undo me." She said it plainly, because she had promised him honesty, and honesty was the only currency she had left.
"I have read it seven times. I have memorized passages I should not have memorized.
The paragraph about the room emptying when I left it -- I have carried it in my head for days like a song I cannot stop hearing. "
He was very still. The firelight moved across his face, highlighting the sharp planes of his cheekbones, the tense line of his jaw, the way his hands hung at his sides with a carefully maintained looseness that she now recognized as restraint.
"I did not intend to cause you discomfort," he said.
"You did not cause discomfort. You caused -- reckoning. You forced me to look at myself honestly, and what I saw was a woman so terrified of feeling something she could not control that she built an entire fortress of contempt to avoid it. You held up a mirror, and I did not like my reflection."
"Elizabeth --"
"Let me finish." She pushed off the bookshelf and crossed to him, stopping two paces away.
Close enough to see the rapid pulse at his throat.
Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from him.
"You asked me to see you. I am seeing you.
I see a man who carried his sister's pain in silence because speaking it would hurt her more.
I see a man who offered marriage to a woman who did not deserve the grace of his proposal and then laid his heart open in a letter because he would rather be rejected honestly than accepted under false pretenses. I see --"
Her voice faltered. She pressed on.
"I see a man I misjudged, and I am sorry. I am so sorry, Fitzwilliam."
His name again. She saw the effect of it on him: a visible shudder, a crack in the marble, his eyes closing for a moment as though the sound of it was too much.
"You have nothing to apologize for," he said roughly.
"I have everything to apologize for. But that is not why I came to the library tonight."
"Why did you come?"
She took the last two steps. Close enough now that she could see the firelight reflected in his eyes, the individual threads of his loosened cravat, the fine tremor in his hands as they fought to remain at his sides.
"Because the room emptied when you left it," she said. "And I followed you."
His breath caught. She heard it -- a sharp, involuntary intake that sounded almost painful. She reached up and touched his face, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw, and the sound he made at the contact was something between a sigh and a surrender, low and rough and so honest it made her ache.
"Elizabeth." His hands came up, hovering at her waist, not quite touching. "If we --"
"I know."
"I cannot -- if you touch me like that, I cannot be responsible for --"
"I know."
"We are not married."
"We are engaged. You said so yourself, in this very room. That night." She ran her thumb across his lower lip and watched his eyes darken. "You said, 'We are engaged, Miss Bennet.' Do you remember?"
"I remember everything about that night. I remember the way you tasted. I remember the sound you made when I --"
"Then kiss me. Not because we were caught, or because honor demands it, or because you feel guilty. Kiss me because I am asking you to."
He kissed her.
It was different from the first time. The first kiss had been a collision, unplanned and violent, the explosion of weeks of suppressed tension.
This was deliberate. This was a choice. He kissed her slowly, his hands finally settling on her waist, his mouth finding hers with a tenderness that was more devastating than any urgency could have been.
She melted into him. There was no other word for it -- her body softened against his, her hands sliding from his jaw to the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair, and the sound she made was not a gasp or a moan but a sigh of such profound relief that it sounded like coming home.
He deepened the kiss gradually, his tongue finding hers with a careful exploration that made her knees weaken, and she gripped his hair tighter, pulling him closer, needing more of him, needing all of him.
His hands tightened on her waist, then slid to her hips, then to the small of her back, each movement a question she answered by pressing closer.
"We should stop," he murmured against her mouth.
"Probably," she agreed, and kissed him harder.
The fire crackled. The rain roared. Thunder shook the windows. And in the library at Netherfield, in the same room where everything had begun, they stopped pretending that stopping was something either of them wanted to do.
His mouth left hers and traveled the path it had taken that first night: along her jaw, down the column of her throat, finding the hollow where her pulse hammered.
She tilted her head back and felt his lips press against the frantic rhythm, felt his tongue taste her skin, and the sensation was so intense that her hands fisted in his shirt and she said his name in a voice she barely recognized.
"Fitzwilliam."
He groaned against her throat. His hands were moving, learning her, tracing the curve of her waist through the fabric of her gown, and she wanted -- God, she wanted -- to feel his hands without the barrier of cloth between them.
She pulled at his cravat. The linen came loose, and she pressed her mouth to the newly exposed skin of his neck, tasting salt and warmth and him, and the sound he made -- a raw, desperate sound that vibrated against her lips -- emboldened her. Her fingers found the buttons of his waistcoat.
"Elizabeth." His voice was strained. His hands caught hers. "Wait."
"I do not want to wait."